Author Rye Silverman

So PETA has launched a new campaign to stop people from fishing and eating fish. Their plan is to rename fish “Sea Kittens” and yes, it is for real.

This isn’t someone making a satirical campaign to mock PETA, this is for real. Setting aside the irony that PETA kills a very high amount of cats in their shelters, I just find the whole thing hysterical. Because if you look at their site, there is a lot of production value in it, they clearly spent a lot of time working on it, probably hired a design contractor to do the site, had creative meetings on the “Sea Kitten bedtime stories” and the “make your own Sea Kitten” function, which by the way includes amongst the things you can dress your own Sea Kitten in, a set of swim floaties, which I’m pretty sure would kill a fish, as they tend to want to remain below the surface, and, you know, continue to breathe.

Once again fulfilling his 4th of July weekend movie quota, Will Smith appears as the titular burned out superhero in Hancock. Previews for months have shown scenes of Smith flying around LA with a bottle of whiskey in his hand, a ratty ski cap on his head, and a case of five o’clock shadow, as he smashes through freeway signs and in general causes more problems than he stops.

Pixar studio’s new release, Wall*E, is following a long line of highly successful animated features from a company who consistently shows they know what they are doing with the medium. Wall*E, as we were told from the first teaser trailer, is the last of the original concepts drawn up by Pixar upon the release of Toy Story. It comes to us 13 years after that first film, and so one must wonder if there was a particular reason why it took so much longer than say, A Bug’s Life or Finding Nemo, and after new concepts such as The Incredibles, Cars, and Ratatouille.

Back in January, I wrote a blog that debated how good an idea a Get Smart remake was in 2008. Can a parody of a genre that no longer functions in the same way it is being parodied work? Having seen the movie, the answer is yes.

Despite my deep geek side wanting to, I resisted the temptation to go see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull at the “12:01” screening. I decided that I had waited 19 years for a new Indy, I could wait ’til Thursday morning. So when I was talking to a friend about it at 12:15, his response was “I heard it sucks.” An odd thing to hear about a movie that had been out for about fourteen minutes and really had probably not even started yet when you consider the trailers. I pointed this fact out to him. “Oh but the reviews are bad,” he said. The reality again is that the reviews, while not stellar, have not been bad. The movie has floated between 77-80% freshness on RottenTomatoes, and that percentage has been increasing, not declining, as it opens nationwide.

Iron Man is a character that I never in my history of comic book fandom cared about. When talk first started circulating about an Iron Man movie, my thought was “I guess they’re hitting them all eventually,” considering that we’ve already been subjected to Ghost Rider and Daredevil/Elektra. Especially now that Marvel has founded their very own studio so that they can produce movies themselves instead of selling the rights and points on the back end to others, it seems fairly certain that their catalog of heroes isn’t going to be closing itself off to the multiplex any time soon.

I love the White Stripes. This is a declaration that seems sort of silly in 2008. Why take the time to write about your love of a band that has been around since 1999, and has held a firm foothold in the mainstream realm of “cool” music since 2001’s “White Blood Cells”?

Fans of Ben Stiller will certainly be anticipating his new movie, Tropic Thunder . ‘Thunder’ will be the fourth movie in which Stiller steps behind the lens as director, a role he has a very good track record with, considering his previous three films are Reality Bites, Cable Guy, and Zoolander. What’s that? You thought Zoolander sucked? Well you know what? You suck!